CareAce Survey: Battery life is the most important feature for new phone buyers

Its about that time of year again, where we start to hear rumors about what the next generation of smartphones will bring to the table. With rumors of supposed quad-core, 1080p Galaxy S III looming around the web, it’s hard not to get excited about our next purchase!

We know that you guys love Samsung Phones just as much as we do but we were curious which features are the most important to you at this point in time. Samsung is well known for their brilliant Super AMOLED displays and snappy Hummingbird/Exynos SoCs, which means they have definitely set the bar very high. Samsung has also consistently designed great looking devices, such as the ultra thin Galaxy S II, or curvacious Google Nexus Phones. There is however one area that seems to always have room for improvement–can you guess what it is?

That’s right folks–battery life. The Achilles heel of every smartphone to date has been its battery. We’ve seen leaps and bounds in display and processor technology, but only hops and skips with regards to battery advancements. Now with the advent of 4G LTE, it seems like battery consumption is forever increasing, whilst capacity is not.

As you can see above, the three most important qualities of a phone for a potential buyer are its battery, display and processor. Samsung has consistently released the best displays and processors, but it looks like users still want to go more than a day without charging. With screens getting larger and denser, this will require more juice to power, and will also strain the CPU more than a lower resolution display, which results in increased battery drain. Now we have seen extended battery packs come as aftermarket options, but these often add bulk to the device that prevents it from wearing any normal type of case. My hope would be that Samsung is able to integrate a large battery into the Galaxy S III as a default feature thus allowing us to have expanded capacity without having to sacrifice a thin form factor.

Based on our results, it looks like people would much rather sacrifice any amount of thinness for an increase in battery capacity. This philosophy was demonstrated when Motorola’s RAZR–touted for its asurdly thin chassis–saw a quick successor in the form of the “Maxx” version with an 85% larger batter (3300 mAh vs 1780 mAh) and a 25% thicker chassis (.35-inches vs .28-inches). Do you guys agree that it would be better to trade thinness for increased battery life? Do you care if the battery is replaceable (the RAZR’s is not)? Let us know in the comments below and remember to vote in our surveys in the sidebar to the right!